I had never heard of the photographer, Ernest Cole (1940 - 1990) before a rave review for this new documentary film appeared on my radio, which I admit I was not that attentive of, since I was eating my evening meal at the time.
Then I saw a listing for the film at my local art house cinema. Again, whilst I knew nothing about Cole, I knew about the subject of the director's previous documentary, 'I Am Not Your Negro', polemical writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924 - 1987). I had in recent years appreciated how James Baldwin had a righteous anger, where because of his views on division by race he put a commitment into modern homosexuality, another part of his life, that the white English middle class homosexuality I had encountered simply did not have. I have for years liked the figures who get marginalised for the art they make and what they had to say, who drew a commitment to social change from their marginality, but had to wait for their recognition. Ernest Cole is one such figure.
The film is a crisp 106 minutes long, and not a minute of it is wasted. I don't know, or remember, many critics who write about what I recognise when it is present in a film, editing. If the image and sound that is melifluous and smooth to the point where the message of the script is delivered that well the listener has to take stock after to realise what message was/is then that editor is somebody who should be praised and thanked in my view.
This film is the story of a photographic book, the story of a photographer and the story of a man who was broken by his own message. To start at the beginning, the laws that created Apartheid in South Africa after WW2 were complex, overlapping, and allowed no escape for those who were confined from public expression by them. As Ernest Cole grew up so these laws developed, and were expanded. These laws included laws on censorship which both prohibited black people from taking photographs and prohibited the publication of photos that did not explicitly flatter the white hierarchy in the country, amongst many other overlapping prohibitions. By some fluke Ernest Cole started work in a magazine as one of the dark room staff. He got a camera and illegally started taking pictures of Apartheid as it was publicly expressed, on the streets and where the seats and fountains with 'whites only' written on them were. The way that men and women dressed, according to the richness of their culture more than their material wealth, he found particularly photogenic in black and white. Life in the city streets must have excited him a lot. Inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson he photographed anything and everything, and he had that 'eye' for a picture where the construction of the image spoke of so much more than itself.
For most of a decade his negatives were his diary and his diary was full of the misery of Apartheid, whilst attempting to be joyful about life. We all know the phrase 'I can't breathe' as used to describe the effects of American racism on black people who feel discriminated against, economically and more directly by the police. Eventually Ernest Cole had to leave South Africa to relearn how to breathe. He felt he was choking on his own talent, his gift of expression. He escaped South Africa with his negatives, which the censors and the authorities knew nothing about, hidden away. He got to New York by boat and contacted a photographic agency to try to get his negatives printed in a book about South Africa. Initially no publisher was interested.
He had a stroke of luck as regards getting his work published, but not as regards his life. The Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was stabbed to death in September the 6th 1966 as he entered a place he felt secure, The House of Assembly in the South African state legislature. Meanwhile Ernest Cole was in New York as a temporary illegal exile, illegal less because of how America viewed his status, and more because of how he had escaped South Africa gave him no means of re-entering the country, and his family were still there. This was a stressful enough status to have to manage daily in itself. Cole's illegally taken pictures depicting a South Africa that went back longer than Verwoerd had been in power found their value in New York, and were published in a book as a witness to a world that South Africa denied existed. With the book 'House of Bondage' it seemed like his life's work this far had found it's place in the world. But he was doubly grieved that the photographic book was banned in South Africa. The suffering he had photographed and the life of exile that caused him such grief had gone far deeper into him than anyone wanted to know. Only fellow exiles from South Africa who were part of an underground New York jazz scene who were similarly scratching a life out from the margins of American society could touch where he felt most grieved.
Before he was thirty he had made the impact on the world he had wanted to have from his first days in the darkroom aged fourteen, but he had no impact on his homeland and was exiled from his family. He remained estranged from his family, criminalised by the South African government and utterly lost living in America. He lived another twenty years on the margins of New York life, and for a period he lived in on the social margins in Sweden, a place where his photographic eye found nothing it could focus on. But he found fellowship with other photographers there. Somehow-nobody alive presently knows how-his negatives and notes about his photographs were kept together and intact but he got separated from them. One of his Swedish photographer friends kept them and they ended up in a bank vault with no records of the deposit in 2016, long after he had died in a New York hospital in 1990, where his mother was the last person to see him alive.
To say 'this film is impactful' is to utterly underplay this documentary feature. If it, and the images in it, do anything to highlight present day racial inequality in a way that remedies and reduces it I will be glad. Ernest Cole engaged in art for life's sake, rathe than art for art's sake. The present day people who cannot breathe are not holding their breath waiting for their release from injustice, they were having the breath knocked out of them by the ongoing renewal of racism via apartheid.
P.s. for a review of the documentary film I saw in February 'Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story' please left click here.
